Seiko renews athletics timing deal

Seiko has renewed its longstanding partnership with the International Association of Athletics Federations for a further six years.

The renewed partnership will see Seiko provide sport timing equipment and personnel to IAAF events until 2019.

Shinji Hattori, chairman and group chief executive officer of Seiko Holdings said: "We are delighted to renew our IAAF partnership for a further six years. This new long-term agreement allows us the time to work with the IAAF and plan new timing and measurement technologies that will really make a difference to the athletes, the officials and the spectators. Athletics is a great sport and we are proud to have supported its development over the past three decades. We look forward to its continued success in the coming years and will do all we can to help make this happen."

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The partnership is one of the most enduring in the world of sport after originally being drawn up in 1985 for Seiko to provide timing services at the 1987 IAAF World Championships in Rome and several events in the build up to it.

The new agreement will last until 2019 and incorporate the next three IAAF World Championships, in Beijing next year, London in 2017 and the yet to be announced event in 2019. The agreement also covers 22 other events during the period, including the IAAF World Indoor Championships and the sport’s major development events, the IAAF World Junior and IAAF World Youth Championships.

The collaboration has seen the continual development of Seiko’s sport timing equipment and in recent years has witnessed to creation of a new false start detection system, new LED-equipped field event boards and a video distance measurement system for long and triple jumps that “has greatly improved the precision, verifiability and speed of the results”.

Seiko’s timing engineers, drawn from the UK and Japan, will be on hand at each of the 25 events covered by the agreement to install, operate and monitor the equipment. Engineer teams will be 50 strong at each of the IAAF World Championships, with 800 man days going into the planning and delivery of each championship event.